What are AWS Instance Types and why they are important

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) IaaS Infrastructure to setup your custom environment. If your application needs installation of specific component or requires Operating System level access then you must go for IaaS based EC2 Instances. However, AWS provides EC2 in different families and it is important to know what are AWS Instance Types and why they are Important?

AWS EC2 Instance Families

EC2 Instance Family

Instance Types

General Purpose

T2, M4, M3

Compute Optimized

C4, C3

FPGA

F1

GPU

G3, G2, P2

Memory Optimized

R4, R3, X1

Storage Optimized

D2, I2, I3

General Purpose Instance: They provide, for example M4, provides a balance of memory, network and compute resources. Some of the Instances in this category have custom Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 Processor that is optimized for EC2.

They have EBS volumes by default, and they offer Enhances Networking for some of the Instance Types

Compute Optimized Instances: These Instances are designed for compute-focused applications and that comes from high-performance processors. These Instances are ideal for Media transcoding, calculating live-streaming data, large gaming applications, high traffic web servers and high-performance computing and applications that require heavy batch processing.

C4 Instances provide EBS Only volume while C3 Instances provide SSD volume. Select this Instance Family when you need high compute, but average Memory with EBS or SSD disks

Memory Optimized Instances:

These instances are best suites for large scale enterprise class in-memory applications like SAP HANA. The instances offer lowest price for each GiB of RAM among EC2 Instances.

AWS provides instances that provide upto 1952 GB of RAM, these instances also offer good compute and SSD disks.

GPU Instances:

These Instances are suitable for machine leanings applications, transcoding jobs, game streaming and other applications that require grahpics processing as well as high compute processing capabilities.